[Talk-us-massachusetts] 2015 ortho licensing, thank-you text

Peter Cooper Jr. pete-openstreetmap-massachusetts-list at cooperjr.name
Thu Jan 7 01:48:09 UTC 2021


On 1/6/2021 8:04 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
> I've been having a brief offlist discussion with Peter about details of
> the MassGIS page, which he has *massively* improved lately, and I've
> added a few typos :-) A few notes from my end.
Well then, I suppose I could add a couple notes here myself. :)

Mainly I just wanted to write it all down for me to use later once I 
forget it all, and I figured if I wanted notes for myself I might as 
well write them down for other people to use too. The MassGIS imagery 
and tools are really neat, and I'm still learning about and discovering 
them. (A lot of stuff there is just educated guesses that seemed to work 
for me in iD and QGIS so I just ran with it and assumed it was the right 
way to do things.)

I also want to thank Greg for helping and encouraging me with this. I'd 
say you added much more to the process than just typos. :)

> […snip…]
>
> 3) I took the liberty of speaking for all us in expressing our
> appreciation for the data being under a compatible license, because I
> believe that is obviously the consenus view and uncontroversial.  Please
> feel free to speak up here or to me privately if you think I shouldn't
> have done that.
Well, it's possible that they can't really put much under more 
restrictive licenses due to it being a government function and all, but 
yes it's very much appreciated that the data is there, and that they 
answer questions, and that it's on a freely available tile server rather 
than needing to check a disk out of some library that's only open odd 
hours or anything weird like that. (They could make it public domain 
without also paying for the bandwidth for random people on the Internet 
to use any part they want at any time, but they actually do both.) It's 
something *very* easy to just take for granted. Thank you for passing 
along our thanks.
>    I plan to send the link to my MassGIS contact tomorrow
> afternoon -- my impression is that they find it useful to be able to
> point to good things that happen because of their data, and amazingly
> state websites use OSM instead of the MassGIS basemap.
A (not so quick I guess) aside: My whole effort on looking at OSM again 
a couple weeks ago started as I was trying to figure out the status of 
the road I live on (is it a public road, or a driveway, or something 
else… it's a long story), but in any event many maps even have this stub 
of the road in the wrong place (confusing it with a pipeline clearing a 
bit further south). So I fixed it in OSM, and then I asked somebody at 
the state (I think it was a contact email somewhere in OLIVER's help) 
about how to fix it and they pointed me to MassDOR RoadIE, which I was 
really surprised used OpenStreetMap. So the tool for reporting errors in 
MassDOT/MassGIS's road data, doesn't even use their own road data as its 
base map! (I could click on the empty space where they thought the road 
was, though, and see there were open issues for it.) I'm not sure what 
any of that says about, something, but I found it interesting.

But yes, I think they're trying to gather anecdotes to help convince the 
Powers That Be to keep giving them more funding so they can keep taking 
pictures from planes and things like that. They have a survey at the top 
of the 2019 Orthoimagery page [1], and a different survey at the top of 
their main site [2], asking what people do with their data and giving 
them help telling a story of how terrible the world would be if they 
couldn't provide it (if I may paraphrase a bit). I filled them out, and 
while I don't know if everyone here filling one out "just because" would 
necessarily be helpful, if you have specific feedback for them I'm 
guessing they'd be happy to hear it. (And maybe mention how useful you 
found the MassGIS imagery & data if you happen to have the ear of your 
state legislator or something.)

[1] 
https://docs.digital.mass.gov/dataset/massgis-data-usgs-color-ortho-imagery-2019
[2] https://www.mass.gov/orgs/massgis-bureau-of-geographic-information

> Also, I would
> like to show them the courtesy of making sure that our description of
> their terms is accurate.
It wouldn't shock me if people here may have thought about their 
licensing terms more than they have by this point. :)

> 4) If you haven't checked out the LIDAR layer at least scroll down and
> look at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuse, which has WWII
> history clearly visible.  (Thanks pete@ for adding this, and I'm glad
> you thought this was cool too.).  FWIW, I know someone who went around
> chekcing blackout shades during hhe war, and saw a talk by people whose
> land was seized in 1942 to create this ammunition storage facility.
It *was* pretty neat, and when I thought that it'd be helpful to add 
some pictures showing examples of what the various layers showed 
(especially the ones that aren't "just" imagery), that area you 
mentioned to me just seemed like the perfect picture to demonstrate the 
power of what the LiDAR data could show. (It was a bunch of things and 
not just like a single line showing a stream or stone wall, it was an 
interesting thing from history, and it was someplace public rather than 
like someone's backyard.) All adding up to a great (public domain!) 
illustrative picture. The ones for the other layers I just took from 
MassGIS's site and aren't nearly as impressive in my mind.

-- 
Peter



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